We produced an article similar to this one at the end of 2023 with some data on our practitioner-model business called Tree First. During 2024, our north star became clearer to us. We’ve known we were doing something different in a nebulous way, but now we can finally articulate it. That is a good feeling in and of itself: to know we have an accurate self-assessment of what we’re doing.

We’ve been making noise about issues with the common tree care operations and common practices. Mainly, the poor arboricultural outcomes as a result of production-driven business models. We’ve been presenting at conferences and publishing content on related topics throughout this time, and will continue to do so. We occasionally publish to TCI Magazine to let their readership know that more of this content can be found if they look for it.

The next conference we’ll be presenting at is the annual Midwest ISA Chapter conference in Overland Park Kansas on January 30th, 2025.

We’ve now spent six years testing the viability of an alternative tree-care model: a practitioner-led model focused on tree preservation. The inspiration behind this project was a strong dissatisfaction with arboriculture in a production setting.

Here is what some of our work data looks like from 2024. A two-arborist team each with their own clients, with a very lean outfit. Minus all the Big Arb BS.

Job Categories

First up, the job major job categories. As we described in A Tree First Approach, the major domains of arboriculture are ‘risk’ management and ‘stress’ management. We’ll call this graph Figure 1. The percentages in Figure 1 do not represent the total amount of revenue gained from these categories. The percentages represent the number of jobs we took in that category. This nomenclature differs from the 2023 edition of this article, but moving forward, this is what we’ll use. Despite the change in nomenclature, stats are consistent with last year even with a 16% increase in total number of jobs. 

Jobs were classified by whatever the main goal of the job was. Plenty of jobs had more than one goal, like a bit of pruning here, and a root crown excavation over there, but tracking multiple data points for this got too messy. So we stick with one major goal per job to keep it simple for now.

Figure 1 shows a breakdown of the major job categories we completed. Across all jobs, 60% of those were in the risk management domain. 27% of those jobs fall under stress management, assessments at 11%, and miscellaneous jobs at 2%.

The risk domain consists of things such as pruning, cabling, removals, cabling, propping; objectives that mainly focus on risk-reduction. The stress domain consists of soil amending and the treatment of stress and diseases. Addressing both of these categories is how more complete arboricultural outcomes are achieved.

Risk

60.4% of all jobs were mainly focused on risk management, by far the largest category of job for us this last year. Figure 2 is a chart breaking down what that 60% chunk of our jobs looked like.

Just like last year, pruning was a huge part of our day-to-day workings with trees. Likely a few reasons for this.

Again, like we defined in A Tree First Approach, it often makes sense to address risk stuff first when working with urban trees. Then we move onto stress management once risks have been reduced, if indeed there are any. As a starting point, folks tend to budget first for risk reductive procedures at our recommendation. Not to mention, while we emphasize a higher level of care to our clients; some folks just want a bit of pruning and that’s it, they don’t always care to go above and beyond. Very well, but it is still important to be able to.

The pruning we’re doing is end-weight reductions of mature and veteran trees, and structural pruning on younger trees as described by Ed Gilman across his body of literature.

We seldom take on removal jobs, and when we do, they’re mostly clearing of saplings from undesirable places like out of the gap between a house and air conditioner. Plenty of tree cutters around us that prefer to kill and poach trees. Couldn’t be us.

Given our smaller equipment and 2-man crew, we aren’t keen on jumping into the frenzy of storm damage clean-up here. But for existing clients, we will do some.

Hauling

Another data point we’ve been tracking now for two years is if we haul material off site or not. We track this not only for risk management jobs like pruning, but for all jobs. Check out figure 3.

This chart should look familiar if you saw last year’s edition. Across all jobs this year, 81% of the time the biomass stayed on site. In 2023, it was 83% of the time. Despite having 16% more total jobs in 2024, each of these figures is nearly identical to 2023.

This metric is included in this article because it is a cornerstone to our lean pruning vehicle. If you want to see that, check out this video. We advocate for environmental stewardship with our clients, both in the management of their trees and with what is produced by those efforts. We educate our clients on the benefits of wood mulch and itemize the hauling costs on our estimates. 

Doing this keeps usable resources on the property where they were produced, which also reduces time and fuel spent hauling, and reduces the number of vehicles on a job site. When these things are explained to the client on top of them saving money by doing this, 81% of the time, they keep their biomass. As a result of describing the wood chips as a resource, not waste, clients see this as a responsible thing to do. And they save money.

What this also means is that we do not have a big chip truck. We don’t need one. And since we aren’t tree killers, and we know how to prune, we don’t need a large chipper either. Our chipper fits into the van itself. When we’re doing risk reductive jobs, 72% of the time all that rolls up on the job is this:

In figure 3, you’ll also see there were a handful of jobs that we hauled material off site for stress jobs too; a small 7% of the time. Let’s talk about that in a second.

Stress

Figure 4 is a breakdown of the stress jobs for 2024. In 2023, the total percentage of jobs that were stress jobs was 18.5%. In 2024, that number increased to 26.5%. Despite the 16% increase in overall jobs, we see an 8% increase in the number of stress jobs. Possibly due to return clients getting to the stress management part of their plan, and an improvement on communicating these topics.

Treatments are made up of disease and very few insect treatments; carried out mostly with trunk injections/infusions, trunk sprays, or foliar sprays. “Soil” is the development of soil improvement zones, root crown excavations, or either liquid or solid soil amendments. And sometimes all of those combined.

A reason we think there are less stress jobs than risk jobs is due to the nature of stress management of trees. It is easier for a non-tree person to grasp risk-reductive pruning. It is visual, they can see it immediately, and the effects are immediate too. Risk management is often done first as a matter of priority and budgeting for the client. It is sometimes the only thing done to trees too.

Sometimes we will haul things off site from soil jobs when the client cannot see a purpose or use in keeping removed sod. This sort of thing happens when we either do a soil improvement zone or root crown excavation. But only 7% of the time (see figure 3).

Assessments

Typically we are doing assessments to determine what we recommend for a given tree. When these assessments are preliminary or simple, we don’t charge money for them. We’ve done countless free assessments. This is also because we sometimes have a difficult time justifying charging money for relatively simple things.

This 11% category of our total jobs represents times we did charge to make an assessment if one was necessary.

This category was divided into simple assessments and advanced ones. The division here was made between assessments that required extra tools beyond a set of binoculars. Advanced testing tools that we use vary, from tomography tools, resistance drills, sap meters, soil probes, chemical soil analyses, etc..

Equipment

Throughout this business’s growth, we consciously equipped ourselves for what we wanted to do: take care of trees. That has guided us up to this point, and it is something we preach to other future practitioners curious about this approach. 

Rather than gearing up only to increase the company’s overall revenue, we’ve chosen to equip to allow for a diverse amount of arboricultural outcomes. Which inadvertently grew the company’s annual revenue, but not through production means. Through expanding what we can do with trees. Expanding what we can assess and make careful judgements on. 

While the assessments category was only 11% of our total jobs, most of those assessments have led to long standing clients and trees with consistent management regimes. The ability to think deeply and assess carefully is a gateway to getting clients and trees that care deeply. Those are the clients most people want; ones that trust you.

Start of Year Seven

A question we receive often is how to scale this model. While we don’t have all of the answers, we do have some ideas and plans.

If you have an already existing production company, a practitioner and practitioner set-up can simply be part of your business. Having a practitioner doesn’t require a whole remodelling of the business. We think it is possible to have a production-team and a practitioner-team. 

Our business just happens to be built solely on practitioners. For us, instead of growing with more ground guys, bigger chippers, bigger whatever, we’re adding an existing practitioner with their own clients and equipment into our business. To grow in depth, not in width.

Combining the assets of both businesses further expands our arboricultural possibilities beyond what we currently have separately. Although the workload on the company increases by doing this, spreading that load across 3 practitioners is a risk we are each acknowledging and accepting.

Tree First began as a proof-of-concept project to see if it was possible to run a tree care company without the BS of the common production-model of tree care. It has evolved and grown into our livelihoods; a fulfilling quest of arboricultural and business skills. We have no plans of stopping.

More to come,
Tree First Forever